This invention concerns a treatment for cancer using a drug administered orally.
In spite of substantial advances in the understanding of the mechanism of oncogenesis (transformation of a normal cell into a malignant one), the treatment of advanced state solid tumor remains elusive. Patients affected with these diseases are destined to die within weeks or months.
Multiple clinical trials could only portray the grim prognosis of patients affected with such diseases as metastatic diffused colon cancer or metastatic diffused liver cancer. Even with the combined use of the four classic treatment modalities: surgery, radiation, chemotherapy and immunotherapy, little has changed over the last five years to alter the deathly outcome. Nothing illustrates this more than the national statistics of hepato-billiary cancer with 15,400 new tumors diagnosed each year and 12,300 annual death rate.
Cancer of the liver of hepatocellular carcinoma is a particular case in point. It is an aggressive and uniformly rapid disease once the spread is beyond the liver. Most patients die within several months. Similar effects are seen in patients with diffused colon cancer. Once the disease progresses or cannot be halted beyond the bowel wall, it is uniformly, rapidly fatal within months and no known cure or prolongation of life regimen is currently known.
The invention described herein is a new model treatment for advanced malignant solid tumor. In particular, hepatocellular carcinoma and diffused metastatic colon carcinoma.
The new treatment consists of the oral administration of high dose Simvastatin, a well-known anti-cholesterol drug marketed by Merck but whose anti-cancer property has never been previously known. Because of ethical considerations, treatment under the scope of this invention has been offered only to terminally ill patients with disease status which was considered by the patients"" oncology experts to be hopeless.
Using such treatment, previously unobtainable clinical results, remission or cure has been obtained in these hopeless cases.